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Stereotypically, a cornucopian is someone who posits that there are few intractable natural limits to growth and believes the world can provide a practically limitless abundance of natural resources. The label "cornucopian" is rarely self-applied, and is most commonly used derogatorily by those who view this perspective as overly optimistic ...
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
William S. Cooper, in his 2001 book The Evolution of Reason: Logic as a Branch of Biology, illustrates how logical rules are derived directly from evolutionary principles. [14] Evolution as computation is a concept explored by John Mayfield in his 2013 book The Engine of Complexity: Evolution as Computation. He synthesizes core concepts from ...
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Cultural selection theory is a theory of cultural evolution related to memetics; Cultural materialism is an anthropological approach that contends that the physics; Environmental determinism is a social science theory that proposes that it is the environment that ultimately determines human culture.
Othniel C. Marsh, America's first palaeontologist, was the first to provide solid fossil evidence to support Darwin's theory of evolution by unearthing the ancestors of the modern horse. [169] In 1877, Marsh delivered a very influential speech before the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, providing a ...
Evolution provides the field of biology with a solid scientific base. The significance of evolutionary theory is summarised by Theodosius Dobzhansky as "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." [78] [79] Nevertheless, the theory of evolution is not static. There is much discussion within the scientific community ...